


i am fond of them, the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing

by midnightRequiem



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: F/M, Parent/Child Incest, Self-Indulgent, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 17:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4573950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightRequiem/pseuds/midnightRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has universes inside of her, but the only one she cares for is the one he's in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am fond of them, the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing

**Author's Note:**

> highly indulgent and barely canon-compliant because bioshock infinite is satan

There are many doors, and many Bookers, and she is weak so she opens them. 

It's 1891; Booker is young and fresh-faced, not yet twenty, yet his broad shoulders quiver under his sins. _The White Injun._ His skin is clean and his face shaven but the blood of the massacre at Wounded Knee is still clinging to him, rusted on his person, invisible to all but he and she. He is drinking already. Not yet twenty but already anchored to a bottle. 

She watches him from across the bar, counts the number of swigs he takes and how many times he sighs at nothing, watches his eyes grow glassier until he looks like an animated corpse. Drink, sigh, drink, sigh. He is not yet a Pinkerton but he's no longer a soldier; he seems out of place without a weapon, and she sees his fingers clench sometimes as if easing around a trigger. 

When he gets up, wobbling slightly, she follows him. The street outside is half-lit by a bonfire, and as he stumbles past it, the harsh shadows make him look twenty years older, the way he did when they met. But she tries not to dwell on that Booker. He's dead now, lining the river bottom somewhere, and she can't think about him too long or she'll get the feeling that she's drowning too, the river pushing her ribs around to make room for itself, her heart and lungs swept along the current until she loses them entirely. 

That Booker is gone but this Booker is here, so she follows him. 

He goes around the side of the building and throws up, pitching to his knees on the dirty pavement and then slumping against the wall of the alley. He withers. He melts. She is strong, though, and she goes to him and heaves him back against the bricks, propping him up. He blinks, unfocused, and then looks up at her like he's seeing the sun. He reeks of his own vomit, but he's still a sight for sore eyes. 

"Who're you?" he mumbles. 

She could answer a number of ways. _Elizabeth. Anna. Your daughter. Your friend. Your killer. Your god._

But none of those are right for this Booker, seventeen and drunk and too young to have his insides overflowing with other people's blood, not yet hardened enough to deal with his own violent past, not yet numbed enough to take any punch. She lets his stiff collar go and runs.

* * *

In another universe, his name is Booker DeWitt and he has a family. 

Summer of 1889, and she stands outside of the New York rowhouse with her hands hiding in the folds of her dress, as if he'll come out and see her palms and remember that they were the ones that held him under the river— _that's not this Booker, stop it_ —until his body sank like a stone, his eyes stabbing her through the surf like Songbird's once had, until the water took him away from her. 

He's not outside but the child is; the little girl sits on the front stoop and she reads, her tiny hands clutching at a book that seems too large for a seven-year-old, and Elizabeth's chest aches. The girl looks like another child Elizabeth remembers well, a girl locked in a tower with a bird and books. Anna DeWitt and Elizabeth Comstock are not so different after all. 

Booker's wife makes a brief appearance. She is alive and well in this reality, and she steps out to stretch a towel out to dry. The girl beams at her mother and her mother beams back. Elizabeth watches it all from the sidewalk, clenching her fists until she hears fabric rip, her skirt tearing like another dimension at her fingertips. It's all she's good for, ripping and tearing, breaking things and breaking circles. 

The woman and the child go inside. She knows she should leave now, knows that people are staring at the strange girl with her hands buried in her dress, but she has to see him before she goes. She waits. The sun skips lower. 

He comes outside in a waistcoat and sleeves pushed to his elbows, no jacket, a bottle in his hand. Booker seems to drink in every universe, but here it's not a problem, just a habit. He sits where his daughter sat. One of his legs stretches askew across the steps, his hand resting on his other knee. His eyes wander, and they land on her. 

Her breathing stops. He looks at her for a short infinity, and she swears that he recognizes her somehow, even though this Booker is far removed from the horrors that brought them together. She expects him to get up and approach her. He debates silently, but eventually, he only gives her a brief nod before turning away. 

Losing his gaze is like losing a limb. The thimble feels cold on her finger when his eyes stray away, and she can't manage to breathe again. She shuts her eyes and the quiet soundtrack of the street— _this was a mistake, this is not your Booker_ —cuts off immediately. She reaches for a door, any door, willing her power to take her far from here. 

It does. When she opens her eyes again, she's on a beach, just like the bay at Soldier's Field. The sun is crawling into the cracks between the boardwalk and burrowing in the sand. There's music coming from the gazebo out over the water, a beautiful melody she knows too well, and she goes to it like moth to flame. 

The people dancing around the gazebo part ways for a moment and she sees him. This Booker is not like her Booker. He's not a killer, just a normal man down to the pressed shirt and trousers, and when he sees her looking he smiles. She doesn't think she's ever seen him smile before. 

"Can I trouble you for a dance, miss?" The smile is still there, genuine, and although she searches his face for the blood that's supposed to be dried under the surface she finds none. This Booker is washed of his sins. He's happy. 

She can be selfish, just this once, and share his happiness. God knows she doesn't deserve it after everything she's put him through. 

"I would love to, sir." She takes his hand. He spins her like she wanted him to a thousand years ago on a similar gazebo, in the same dress with the same music. The only difference is the man and the place. 

The music dies down as the players take a break, and in the ensuing quiet, the odd, happy Booker lets go of her and steps back respectfully, the grin still on his face. He's handsome, no doubt, but she thinks to herself that he's better suited with a scowl.

"I hope I'm not being too forward, miss, but I'd be a lucky man if you sat down to dinner with me." 

Her chest constricts. This must be how Songbird felt when the water crushed him; Booker's words are the ocean and they threaten to burst through the weaknesses between her ribs. She could be selfish a little longer and say yes. She could pretend she hasn't seen him die a hundred deaths, sometimes at her hand, sometimes not, and go to a restaurant on the water front and watch the waves reflect in his eyes while he smiles. Her eyes keep going to his lips; she has never seen this smile and she wants to drink it in for when she's alone, which she knows is imminent. 

"I'm afraid I have to go," she says. In this universe she does not kill Booker DeWitt, but she takes his smile on the way out.

* * *

He exists in countless universes, but _her_ Booker is nowhere to be found. 

They come close, sometimes; sometimes they're hardened like him, green eyes full of regret, calloused hands surprisingly gentle on her waist. Sometimes they talk just like him. Sometimes they kill as easily as he could. But there's always something missing. They always fall short. 

The Booker with her now is cradling a shotgun lovingly, like he might have cradled Anna, and he's almost a perfect replica of her Booker. He has a deep scowl caving in between his eyebrows, blood smeared on his torn clothing. His voice is rough, words harsh, but now and then he'll put a hand on the small of her back as they walk and he'll turn just slightly towards her, protective and unfaltering. 

This version of Columbia is broken, like a toy city that a child stamped his foot over. Bodies of Founders and Vox Populi and ordinary citizens litter the streets. Booker glues himself to her side, focused on the task but still devoted to keeping her safe, so much like her Booker that she finds salty tears trying to come to her eyes. She wants him back so badly, the real him, and the man at her side is within inches of that desire, but he's not the one. He isn't and he can't be. 

She can't go on like this anymore, pretending to be Elizabeth and Booker with the wrong Booker, and she stops abruptly. He looks at her strangely. "The hell? Elizabeth, we have to go. It's not safe here." 

She shakes her head, rocks back and forth on her heels. She wants him, but not this him, and her thoughts flatline. He keeps looking at her with his intense, sharp eyes, and when she can't take it anymore she catches his face between her hands and kisses him. 

There's a part of her, a part named Anna DeWitt, that recoils; this is Anna's father. But Elizabeth, the daughter of a hundred thousand universes, has no concept of father and daughter, and she's the one who presses as close to him as she can, shutting her eyes so that she can pretend, for a moment, that this is her Booker—he feels like him, smells like him, holds her like him—and she forgets all about lighthouses and doors and tears. His shotgun clatters to the cobbled street. 

He reciprocates, for a while, his hands taking to her with his usual strength, his lips giving everything back to her tenfold. But it's only for a brief blink in time. His senses come back to him, and he jerks away, face red as he stoops to pick up the gun. "Look, we've really got to go—"

His voice breaks off. He doesn't know what else to say, floored, and she stares up at him with no discernible expression. It was wonderful, indulgent, thrilling, but it was just a placebo. Elizabeth shuts her eyes. The doors are spread before her. She finds the one she needs, the only one that matters, and she steps through it. 

She lands in the river. 

Booker is before her. Her Booker, the real Booker, the one who led her from the tower through the city in the sky. His face is horror-stricken. He knows, then, that he's Comstock in another reality, that she's his daughter. She looks to either side of her; the other versions of herself are gathering at her sides, stoic, waiting for her to wipe them out along with him. She puts her hands on his shoulders. The feeling of them under her palms, the feeling of the honest-to-God Booker DeWitt, makes her eyes want to well up again, but she doesn't let them. She'll enjoy this while it lasts. 

She puts all her strength into her hands and pushes him down, but it's unnecessary; he doesn't resist. His eyes are gem-bright beneath the lapping waves, and she tries to communicate that she's glad to see him. Drowning him might be a mixed message. 

When his eyes drift with the passing of the current and his lungs move no more, she doesn't take her hands away. The other Elizabeths are already gone, the circle broken, except it's not; she knows this now, that Booker will always be alive in this river until she kills him, and she sinks into the water with him and wraps her arms around his body, pressing her face to his chest until she has to come up for air and then doing it again. 

Sopping wet with river and tears, she lets him go, and the gentle current takes him away. When his body is out of sight, she wades back to the door and goes through it, coming out dry on the other side. She stands on the docks of the universe for an indefinite amount of time, then she turns around and steps back through the door. 

He's here again, alive, waiting for her to smother him. Her other selves join her. She puts her hands on his shoulders like before, savors the feeling. She kills him. She holds him. She leaves. 

She comes back. He's alive. She leaves, and he's dead. 

But she's untroubled. When she comes back, he'll be alive. It will only be for precious seconds, but precious seconds are exactly what the universe is made of. She should know.

**Author's Note:**

> (i'm satan too)


End file.
